Shape shifting
Geometry and public opinion
Public opinion takes many forms. Sometimes it can be colourful and lively, otherwise it can come in shades of grey. It can be in plain sight or elusive. It can be hard and soft, rigid and malleable. It’s sometimes ‘large’, sometimes ‘small’. And it comes in many shapes — box-like, cube-like, circular and triangular, or simply dead straight.
Before geometry, some history
According to an excellent summary in Britannica, “…phenomena that closely resemble public opinion seem to have occurred in many historical epochs.” References to popular attitudes have been found in the ancient histories of Babylonia and Assyria including the legend of a caliph who, in disguise, would mingle with people to hear their views about his rule.
While it was Jacques Necker, the finance minister for Louis XVI who popularized the term public opinion, it has always been a fascinating subject for philosophers. Unlike Plato, Aristotle saw some value in public opinion — “he who loses the support of the people is a king no longer”.
Friedrich Hegel theorised that public opinion contained both truth and falsehood and added that it was the job of “the great man” to distinguish between the two. Niccolò Machiavelli advised that princes should not ignore popular opinion. We can see these theories play out in practice in modern democracies but following rather than leading public opinion has also been a criticism levelled at politicians and policymakers.
Boxed off
Quantitative measurements of public opinion have involved boxes from the outset. Survey respondents are asked to tick them either on paper or on screen, or interviewers do it on their behalf.
Regrettably, ‘tick box’ became derogatory slang for officious compliance rather than real engagement while the reputation of market research has been sullied by marketing pretending to be research. Pseudo opinion polls — ‘push polling’ — have attracted controversy as manipulative attempts to influence voters.
Boxes are used for analysis purposes too. Responses are combined into top and bottom two boxes to make it easier to, for example, understand levels of support (the proportion in strong agreement added to those who tend to agree) relative to opposition (the addition of strong and milder levels of opposition).
This can lead to over-simplification with public opinion portrayed as, for example, anti-immigration or ‘nimby’. In his 2023 book, Professor Matthew Goodwin described how a ‘New Elite’s pursuit of a progressive liberal monoculture created a populist backlash as the mainstream felt they were being marginalised. This made them receptive to ‘taking back control’ and created a disruptive realignment in British politics.
Ben Ansell took issue with this analysis, challenging the notion that there is a single ‘will of the people’. His view is that there is no single block of public opinion pitted against a monolithic elite and described such mistaken analysis as the ‘democracy trap’. Not one box, several.
Boxes can operate inside other boxes. As the ‘father of psephology’, Sir David Butler wrote in the 1950s that “politics are peripheral to the lives of most people; they think and act in relation to their immediate environment … electoral trends cannot be understood without reference to social trends”. The same holds true today.
More recently, behavioural psychologists have pointed to the power of bias and heuristics — for example, feelings can shape conceptions of facts as much, or more than, facts influencing feelings.
Lines and maps
Public opinion is often considered as operating along a straight line, a spectrum. This binary frame can run yes-no, pro-anti, left-wing-right-wing and so forth. During last year’s General Election, I used a similar metaphor to describe the relationship between politicians and public, between government and governed. I likened this to a linear power supply, specifically to direct and alternating currents.
With direct current (DC), electricity flows in a fixed direction whereas alternating current (AC) is more of a pulse with changes from positive to negative and from negative to positive. There are justifiably times when politics and policymaking tend towards a direct, one-way setting of broadcast or listening mode. But, to thrive, we need more alternation, more AC.
We might use two lines and map opinions on a matrix — for example, The Political Compass is a website rating visitors’ political ideology against two axes: one about economic policy (left–right) and another about social policy (authoritarian–libertarian). But 3D shapes like cubes, pyramids, and prisms are also useful ways of conceiving of public opinion.
Triangles too
The different dimensions of shapes can be based on different components or drivers of opinion. For example, Sir Robert Worcester — founder of MORI — used a 3D metaphor to describe values as “the deep tides of public mood, slow to change, but powerful”, opinions as “the ripples on the surface of the public’s consciousness — shallow and easily changed”, and attitudes are “the currents below the surface, deeper and stronger”. To understand public opinion, we must gain insights across all three.
Worcester also developed the Political Triangle to symbolise how voters’ decisions were based on a combination of leaders, parties, and policies, with varying degrees of importance for each. Three, is of course, the so-called ‘magic number’ and in 2015 I used a “troika of tensions” to simplify the state of British public opinion. The corners of my equilateral triangle were aspiration, fairness and identity. I argued that navigating public and political opinion meant working with all three tensions, recognising that they could rub up against each other.
Another triangle comes in the form of a global-national-local nexus of perspectives and worldviews. Public opinion is also shaped by another three factors — people’s psychological makeup, personal circumstances (including their ‘lived experience’) and external influences.
While social norms and social desirability bias are not new phenomena — during World War Two, men in the U.S. military who transferred from one unit to another often adjusted their opinions to conform with their new peers — they have gained currency in the past few decades.
Acute and obtuse, round and round
Triangles can be acute and obtuse, reflecting the respective strength of the attributes we use to represent them. Thus, global-national-local considerations can each exert more or less influence in shaping public opinion depending on the issue and the situation.
Movements in public opinion are often represented by lines, but they can also be considered as circular. On some issues, public opinion can be described as thermostatic, oscillating between ‘on’ and ‘off’ positions depending on the conditions, in effect moving around the circle. (In an extension of the metaphor, people often talk about public opinion in terms of dials and moving them). For example, people are more bullish about welfare provision and government spending during economically hard times with the opposite is true in better times.
Circles are complete. We present public opinion in terms of percentages, using the circle — or pie chart, or donut — to account for all its component parts and to show their relative incidence.
Throwing shapes
Public opinion is full of shapes, geometrical metaphors for the way we understand and represent it. Of course, shapes can shift, and they can be shifted, a phenomenon which resembles Antony Garrett Lisi’s description of the universe:
“I think [it] is pure geometry — basically, a beautiful shape twisting around and dancing over space-time.”
What shape will public opinion take next?
